


Four Part Harmony

by daroos



Series: Pants Off [1]
Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Backstory, F/F, F/M, Foursome, M/M, Multi, Pants off party time, Threesome, relationship origins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-11
Updated: 2012-12-11
Packaged: 2017-11-20 21:11:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/589674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daroos/pseuds/daroos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How do an assassin, a spy, a super-soldier and the world's bravest research assistant actually, really work together?  Some relationship backstory from Pants Are Overrated on that very topic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Four Part Harmony

Natasha had never learned to let people in; her world was composed of ownership and debt. Natasha and Clint had worked together for so long— _been_ together for so long that she didn’t so much let him in as he became a part of her, nestled deep between fragile reaching hope and a sense of solid trust. He was as well understood to her as each of her limbs and just as reliable.

She had never told him any of this. Neither had she told her hands that she appreciated their strength, nor her legs their flexible power. They were a part of her, unquestionably.

When little Darcy had come into the picture—eyes that tried for cynicism but merely managed suspicion, a mouth that was all unpracticed seduction and a generous, bourgeois figure—she had been skeptical. Clint was over the moon for her; he was quiet about it of course, but Natasha knew. He’d still and track her when she’d walk through to Hill’s office, delivering paperwork. The barest flick of his tongue at his lips, and the faintest closing of his grip were as good as billboards advertising his blatant want.

“Wait, what are you doing Tash?” he’d asked when she stood abruptly as Darcy exited Hill’s office.

She gave him a pitying look over her shoulder and slipped into the office. “I want the girl for hand to hand, Barton will take her for weapons,” she told Hill simply. Clint’s head poked into the office inquisitively and Hill gave them both a measuring look.

“That _girl_ is Sitwell’s secretary and not on a track for Agent. Do I need to ask why she needs training by some of my top assets in anything other than database design and ultra-top-secret filing?” Hill asked evenly.

Natasha simply stared her down with a raised eyebrow. Natasha couldn’t see him but she knew Clint would be wearing a guilty, caught-out expression.

Hill shrugged. “I’ll get you access to her files. Do what you will.”

“Can I tell you something?” Darcy asked, voice not entirely steady. Natasha had accessed her calendar and completely rearranged it with thrice-weekly blocks of time labeled “self defense” and twice-weekly blocks after lunch labeled “range.” She had shown up in the gym as the note requested to find the Black Widow in SHIELD issued workout gear wearing a critical look. Darcy looked as though she wanted to shit herself, which Natasha took for the sensible self-preservation instinct it was.

“Even were you to lie it would be telling me a sort of truth.”

“Because that is so not creepy.” Darcy rolled her eyes. “You scare the fuck out of me. Why in the hell did you—”

“Enough questions,” Natasha cut her off. Darcy flushed, the barest hint of color on ivory cheeks, and silenced herself. She bit her lip and ran her tongue along it in a motion Natasha was sure was unconscious. She was scared, but showed just a hint of arousal at the order. Natasha could almost see the switch flip as Darcy decided she had to trust this alien, dangerous woman in front of her and settled in a stance which subtly displayed her throat.

Natasha smiled. This girl she could work with. This girl, she could craft into a part of herself.

Darcy took a beating well, and she learned from it. However, much she was just a secretary or a research assistant or whatever it said on her ID card that day—in as much as anybody was “just” anything for SHIELD—she could be something more to Natasha; a sweet little bird she could keep safe.

Not that she would ever tell Darcy that. You didn’t tell your tender spots that they were soft and weak. Darcy’s pliant, earnest, willing personality were things Natasha could make part of herself for Clint’s sake.

Clint was at loose ends as to how to make a move, bless his mushed, stupid face. Sure, he spent several hours a week with her drilling on ranged weapons in the shooting gallery. Sure, Darcy’s breath would quicken when Clint laid a palm against her shoulder blades to get her to steady them. Sure, Darcy thought Clint’s penchant for using a bow was charming and debonair and begged repeatedly to try one until he brought out one of the bows that was closer to sports equipment than a weapon.

Clint would tell Natasha about this or that charming thing Darcy had said that day, the way her mouth had quirked just so, or how he had almost missed a shot because he was steadying her, staring down her blouse. Natasha would roll her eyes and call him a child, and he would return the look with his big blue puppy-dog eyes which nobody else seemed to know about.

Natasha helped Clint work out his sexual frustration willingly, but part of her felt like she was pilfering from another woman’s rightful winnings. Her solution to the problem was simple.

Clint was taking shameless advantage of his “instructor” role and was pressed down Darcy’s straight back helping to adjust her shoulders properly. Natasha slipped into their stall, neatly disarmed Darcy, and spread her hand to span from ear to throat on the other woman. Darcy stilled, pulse visibly hammering in her neck but otherwise frozen. Darcy’s tongue darted out to the spot on her lip she liked to bite, and that was invitation enough. Natasha pressed herself full length against Darcy, still wrapped in Clint’s arms, and took a kiss from her. She pulled back and was gratified to get a mewl of surprise from Darcy and a needy whine from Clint.

“I am so getting fired,” Darcy murmured without moving anything but her mouth.

“Why do you say that?” Natasha asked, hand still wrapped around Darcy’s pulse.

“Or killed. I could be murdered for my own safety.”

Natasha looked at her delicate bird critically, confused. “Nobody would let that happen,” she said finally. Natasha gently removed her hand from Darcy’s pulse and pinned Clint with only a look. “You two are going on a date. It will be at a restaurant requiring a tie and jacket for which I have already arranged reservations. You will take her wherever she wants after and make sure she gets to her door without issue. Alternately she may sleep over at our quarters. Is that understood?”

“Yes ma’am,” Clint replied automatically. Darcy simply stared with wide, bright eyes.

Steve was the biggest surprise. Captain America was the last person Natasha thought she could fold into herself. Deep down she was certain that her core was somehow allergic to him; she would reject his simple goodness and his baseless _belief_ in all of them like a foreign organ. She never expected that burly mountain of America to look at her, wondering and joyful, and throw her into danger with trusting abandon. She never expected his simple, shy charm to get under her skin and make _her_ want to reach out. That first drunken night still held a hazy aurora to it—straddling Steve’s trim hips and coming on his hand—but it came with flashes in sharp relief. Steve’s head thrown back, sweat darkening the hair plastered to his forehead, Adam’s apple working to contain an eager whimper. Darcy sinking on to him, sighing and wrapping her arms around his head, muffling her moans against his collarbone. Looking him in the eyes as Clint fucked her in long, efficient strokes, his eyes full of wonder and surprise.

Clint was a limb, Darcy a tender spot she kept well guarded, but Steve was a bright part of herself she never knew she could contain. On some deep level she hoped to live up to his regard, and in that way he made her a better person.

\--

Clint stretched out on his bed happily. The palatial and firm but forgiving platform bed was his concession to Stark’s over the top decorating prowess, and it was by far the favorite part of their apartment. Steve was rubbing the SHIELD equivalent of horse liniment into slowly relaxing muscles after Hulk had thrown a concrete park bench at him accidentally. Natasha was doing her sleep-of-the-dead post-mission routine, and Darcy had gone to get takeout, leaving “her boys” alone. Steve had largely finished, the liniment heating and numbing his muscles and joints like Icy-Hot on steroids, and was down to light strokes down Clint’s spine. At the best of times Clint was a touch-starved contact-whore, so he merely relaxed into it and rumbled happily, stretching limbs out further. The touches traced light over his skin; shoulders, ribs, hip. Clint twitched.

“Sorry,” Steve apologized immediately, removing his hands to a neutral position.

“No. S’okay.” Clint turned his head so he could squint one eye at Steve. “There’s just some nerve damage there so it feels... It doesn’t hurt.” Steve relaxed slightly, thighs which were settled over Clint’s hips loosening. “What were you doing that you look so guilty about?” Clint croaked.

Steve blushed. “Your scars... Since the Serum I don’t... I shouldn’t have.”

“No,” Clint insisted, “Keep going. I’ll tell you about them.”

As much as Clint used to be sensitive about every scar and mark left on his skin by a less than tender childhood those had faded and become overshadowed by the marks of fifteen years with SHIELD. Those were marks he was proud of; each represented a moment he skipped out on Death, saved someone, or stopped something worth stopping. He was never a tattoo sort of guy, but nonetheless his skin was a roadmap to a hard-won life. Steve retraced the knife wound along his hip that had made him jump. The sensation was wrong: part normal, part numb, and part scrambled cold/pressure sensations. “I got that during an extraction on protection detail in Columbia. The mark was actually a doctor; you can see where she stitched me up after we got to the safe house.”

“You got her out?” Steve asked, smoothing his palms down the raised flesh.

Clint smiled lazily, “Yeah. She’s director of the WSC medical in South America now.”

Steve moved on to a peppering of pock marks along his flank, fingertips contacting each scar. “Shrapnel,” Clint said simply, sighing under the gentle taps. He reached for Steve’s hand and ran it through his hair until it hit a long thin scar over his left ear. “Here - you can’t see the one unless my hair’s really short. Tash gave me that sparring when she’d first come in. That was the first time I saw Coulson in a screaming match with anyone.” Clint didn’t say that he thought that was the moment Natasha realized how mundanely _fragile_ he was. Until she split his skull open and he lost almost a pint of blood on the mat and _didn’t get up_ she had thought everyone bounced back like she did. Whatever they had done to Natasha in Mother Russia meant she could take more punishment than him and almost never retained a scar.

“This one?” Steve asked, kneading into a thick knot of scar tissue around a puckered bullet wound just missing his collarbone.

“I thought I was in a sniper shootout with one other sniper. Turned out to be two.” Steve made a dismayed sound deep in his throat. “I got the second guy. Natasha and Phil came for me.”

Steve traced over the remaining scars: long lines of abrasions, a permanent scar down his shooting arm from times he hadn’t had his arm guard on, an ugly discolored patch where he had taken some camping gear through the leg in a fall and it had gone septic. A thousand cuts and scrapes and burns whose stories all ended with, “and I survived.” Steve flipped him over and began working through the marks down his front—some mirrors of the ones on his back, all familiar old friends. He found the ghost of puncture wounds from when Clint had gotten into the Snake Charmer’s tent on a dare and the scar from when they took his appendix out. He touched the neat march of cigarette burns down his thigh from when he was captured in Ukraine, and the messy tangle of electrical burns from Laos. He touched the almost invisible scar from when SHIELD had to wire his jaw back together after getting in the middle of a bar fight between Army Rangers and some junior agents he had been sent to fetch.

The feeling of Steve’s bulk over him was comforting, like a soft blanket shielding him from the world. Clint rutted lazily against the thigh braced between his legs, grinning while Steve continued on his exploration, unperturbed. Clint had worked up a hopeful erection when Darcy poked her head into the room. “I got— _hello_!” She whistled appreciatively, fragrant takeout bag forgotten in her hand. “No, no, continue. Tacos will keep.”

“Tacos?” Clint and Steve asked in tandem.

“One day you guys are going to be arrested for fucking under the boardwalk at Coney Island while eating hot dogs and Tony is going to laugh so hard he won’t be able to bail you out.”

Steve turned bright pink.

“I would have no regrets,” Clint replied solemnly. “That sounds like everything I want in life.”

Steve smoothed his hands down Clint’s stomach one last time, ending in a squeeze at his hips before rising. “Food, then a nap, then we’ll see what everyone is up for.”

“Sir, yes Sir.”

Clint had stolen into Darcy’s life like the special-forces-trained ninja he was. He had learned long before Loki that letting people in was a sure way to get hurt, and that lesson had only been hammered home after, when former friend after former friend simply couldn’t look him in the eye. Sneaking in—lurking on the periphery and soaking in a bit of the good vibrations—that was something Clint felt emotionally ready for. The Avengers, and Avengers Tower in specific, provided the perfect environment for that sort of interaction.

“This is too creepy for words, Barton,” Natasha told him one day. “If you don’t quit spying on the kid from the duct work...” She trailed off. Her normal threat would have been that she would tell Phil. Sitwell didn’t hold the same threat. Hill would actually flip her shit and write him up, which he probably deserved. “I’ll tell her you’ve been doing _exactly what you’ve been doing_ and she’ll get herself reassigned and probably never speak to you.”

Clint had maintained his silently pining course until Natasha had stepped in and made it clear what she and Darcy wanted.

Dinner with Darcy was amazing. It felt like doing anything with Darcy was amazing. Though it was obvious that they both had their social hangups—Clint had spent 15 years killing people, Darcy was in the awkward stage between being a college student and being a real 100% realized human person—they somehow complimented each other. They were hilariously ill-suited to the very nice restaurant Natasha had booked for them, and both covered it by pretending to know what they were ordering. 

Clint was never sure what they ended up ordering even _after_ it was put in front of them. The appetizers were, he was relatively sure, something with bivalves and some sort of animal’s more obscure organs. Darcy closed her eyes and allowed him to feed her bites of things, and then he did the same at her dare. It was like playing Fine-Dining Chicken and both of them were too competitive to refuse the other. Half the staff seemed to think they were cuter that a pile of kittens and puppies hugging, the other half were too professional to be rubbing their eyes and cursing under their breath. They drank wine. Clint demonstrated his proficiency at hitting anything with anything else, using a pile of lentils Darcy had declared tasted like really classy feet as ammunition. They made double and triple entendres through the whole meal and Darcy actually, really, not as a joke, slipped her stockinged foot out of her deadly and beautiful heels and played footsie with him.

Darcy snuggled up close to him when they walked out of the restaurant and wrapped her cold hands around him, under his jacket. A tiny, giddy part of himself he hadn’t known had gotten stomped on uncurled hopefully at the feel of her wrapped around his middle. His phone buzzed just as the elevator stopped on Darcy’s floor. She was, at that moment, pressing herself down the side of him in an invasive version of her previous vertical cuddle move, so she felt the vibration.

“You should get that.”

He glanced down at her and realized his arms were wrapped around her and he really didn’t want to let go. She was right though; it could be something world-threatening. He flipped his phone open and snorted. He showed it to Darcy. “Tash has some very strong opinions about our relationship.” She had simply picture-messaged Clint with one badly-drawn stick figure pressing two other stick figure heads together with “Now Kiss!” written shakily above it.

“Oh, she’s the only one who has opinions? I see how it is.”

“I would be—” he didn’t get the opportunity to finish; Darcy pushed him against the wall behind where the elevator opened and kissed him, soft but demanding.

Somehow they managed to leave it at that. Well, they left it at some light groping and serious making out in the hallway.

“You are besotted,” Natasha told him the next morning while he swirled his protein shake lazily.

“She’s—”

“—smart and funny, incredibly attractive, understands your schizophrenic work schedule and has the clearance to actually know what you do. And she still wants you.”

Clint sighed. “Yeah.”

“Maybe you should do something thoughtful and sweet for her.”

“Did you just suggest I do something romantic for my co-worker who I’ve been on one date with?”

“Of the two of us, who is considered the master of seduction?”

Clint and Natasha paused in a staring match. Clint blinked. “Fuck... how do you do that?” Natasha merely smiled. “So... bring her coffee?”

“Yes. Bring her your dark roast kill like an enamoured housecat.”

Natasha could be so right with some things. Darcy answered his knocks in a t-shirt that clearly showed she wasn’t wearing a bra, and short-shorts. Clint tried to avert his eyes—he tried to be a gentleman, really—but her breasts had a gravitational pull rivaling that of Jupiter. He ended up holding out the mugs of coffee and ducking his head mumbling something about “good morning” and “I had a really good time last night” and “I hope this isn’t creepy.”

“I will have Natasha’s babies,” Darcy said before inviting him in.

When not in a pencil skirt or suit jacket, Darcy was an octopus. Her perpetually cold hands found their way into the most improbable locations and he more often than not found himself with a lapful of her. Natasha seemed to take a perverse pleasure in watching them. Clint was uncomfortable but so desperately enjoyed the affection he couldn’t bring himself to fend off Darcy’s enthusiastic advances.

“You don’t have to—” Clint squirmed to the arm of the couch and propped himself up with the bulwark guarding his one side. Even while telling himself he didn’t need it, he swayed towards Darcy’s physical contact like a flower towards the sun.

“ _Just let me love you,_ ” Darcy said, holding out her arms and wrapping them around his neck. Her cleavage suffocated him a bit but that was mostly a bonus. She pulled back with a smile that faded slowly when she saw his stunned look.

“Just let her love you, Barton,” Natasha said over the top of her book.

Clint ducked his head but couldn’t help the little smile that tugged at his lips. He held open his arms and Darcy wrapped around him once more as though she would never let go.

Natasha and touch had an interesting relationship. When she had been brought in it had only taken a few agents with broken wrists for the entire operation to get the “Do Not Touch” message loud and clear. She held herself careful and royal and an invisible five foot bubble formed around her.

As much as Clint wanted to reach out and sooth the brittle look from her eyes, he knew the value of giving a struggling person room. She eyed him as he slipped through her personal space, self-contained and sniper-quiet, but never stopped him. He’d walk the halls at her side and join her at the sparring mat, taking fall after fall and never complaining. Over months she seemed to become inured to touching him and began allowing the small contacts of everyday life: a brush of fingers against the back of her hand to draw attention, a jostle on the plane while waiting to deploy, a grip at the shoulder so he could check her pupils for signs of concussion.

“You’re really good with her,” Coulson commented to Clint after a debrief.

Clint shrugged. He remembered a time not so long previous when he couldn’t imagine a touch being the prelude to anything but eventual pain. He still caught her occasionally ensnared in whatever programming they had shot her up with in the Red Room. She would stare cruelly at nothing at all, fine muscles shuddering across her face so quick the expressions they formed were unidentifiable. “Tash.” He tried to break her out of the pattern only once. She’d stood fluidly and pinned him against a locker with an incongruous, soft kitteny look. Her lips were so red and full, her eyes bright and wide, the crotch of her SHIELD-issued pants hot when they clamped around his leg.

“Tash, what are you doing?”

She stilled abruptly, the hand at the back of his neck shifting subtly to cut off his blood flow with just a bit of pressure.

“You’re safe, Tash. Come on back.” The effort it took to not react to the clear and present danger of the hand at his throat was monumental. He knew if he startled her she would hold on and have him unconscious in less than five seconds. He wasn’t certain she would stop there. She tilted her head consideringly.

“Yes, I suppose I am. Never speak of this.”

“Speak of what?”

The danger of liking high perches was that he had the annoying habit of falling off of them. Grapnel arrows were only useful if the fall distance was greater than 100 feet and if all the surrounding structures weren’t collapsing. Clint managed not to die by creative use of decorative banners advertising a museum exhibit and a store awning, but he had a split across his forehead that had bled enough that even without the head blow he would have probably passed out. He woke in Medical. Natasha had their cheeks pressed together and was murmuring in his ear in Russian. She must have felt him rouse, because she kissed him on the cheek, just below his eye, and rose.

Their actual instances of sleeping together before the Avengers happened was relatively few. Clint was well able to pull wherever he happened to be at the time if he felt the need, and SHIELD had them traveling to different parts of the world enough that they rarely saw each other for long stretches. Those rare times that they ended up in bed were when one or both of them felt broken and needed someone who remembered who they were to put them back together. Natasha could be unexpectedly gentle and unsurprisingly violent. He left some of their encounters with claw marks walking bowlegged, and others with the languid soft feeling that a night of uninterrupted sleep following earth shattering orgasms resulted.

“Phil said the rumor mill says you’re sleeping with Fury.”

“Phil gossips like an old woman.”

“Is it true?” Clint asked.

Natasha gave him a barely-there one shouldered shrug.

“Fury??”

She one shoulder shrugged again. “Are you jealous?”

“No. I just am amazed that you found the one man on earth I couldn’t give the ‘hurt her and die’ talk to.” She shrugged again. He knew that she knew that he knew she could take care of herself just fine, but he also knew that a part of her liked that he would put out the effort for her regardless.

“I aim high.”

She appeared impassive, but Clint knew she was preening. “Oh my god. My cock and Fury’s cock have both—it’s like we’ve had sex.”

“The transitive property does not apply to intercourse.” She paused. “I had to have some kind of pressure relief to work with Stark. Keeping track of that man is like following a drunk ape with a jetpack.”  
\--  
Darcy had grown up country enough that half her young life had been spent on horseback. She’d gleefully spent hours hacking through the desert astride rangy mustangs and quarter horses, their huge haunches waggling in their wake. She had ridden trim hunter-jumpers and moose-like dressage horses. Darcy, in short, had a lot of experience with powerful beasts between her thighs.

She was relatively certain that her bed partners would not appreciate being compared to horses, but it was something she had done since riding her first real boyfriend’s cock and she wasn’t about to stop.

Clint reminded her of her favorite trail horse, Leroy. He had been pulled out of a wild mustang herd at the age of five or six and had never lost the proud cant to his head or his cocky prancing gait. Leroy was sure footed and smooth across any terrain; you pointed him in a direction and trusted that he would get you there as quickly and pleasantly as possible. Leroy would let you be in charge, but Darcy always got the feeling he was laughing about some private joke that involved her. They were both experience and confidence, time-tested strength and willful tricks between her thighs, calling her to be on her game. 

Natasha was Pipa, the little arabian/Thoroughbred hunter-jumper she had trained one long winter while her owner was in and out of the hospital with a difficult pregnancy. Pipa had been a key factor in Darcy’s near death five times in those six months. Pipa was strong and smart, demanding of her full attention and willful. She never fully trusted Darcy and would only take a jump if she liked the look of it. That decision she made through a complicated algorithm of which Darcy never gained any understanding. 

Some mornings Darcy would walk to the stable and Pipa would be peering over her stall door, ears pricked and swiveling attentively. She would warm up on the lunge line, a soliloquy to equestrian beauty in powerful muscles under sleek chestnut flanks. When she was of a mind, Pipa could take Darcy anywhere; sailing over four and five foot jumps with light grace, across water obstacles with an effortless confidence, landing with barely a jolt. Darcy had rapidly learned what days she should stick to ground work after nearly breaking her collarbone when Pipa refused a jump. She flew over her withers and into the wooden crossbars. Natasha mirrored that lithe willfulness. Watching her nude, muscles working under smooth skin, reminded Darcy of that inhuman elegance.

Upon first seeing Steve, Darcy anticipated his planes of taut muscle feeling like the granite they appeared to be. She was pleasantly surprised the first time she pressed against the long length of him to find him warm and almost soft, solid by pliant. He was like a well-stuffed couch: supportive, but molding to her curves. Darcy’s first not-pony-but-a-real-horse was a massive pinto named Tonto. From the ages of eight to ten and a half she and Tonto were inseparable. He had had broad shoulders and thick legs, and he moved with a rolling gait like crashing waves. Barrel racing with Tonto was like driving an obstacle course with a Cadillac: a lot of shit got destroyed in the process, but man was it a smooth ride. 

Tonto seemed to know the precious cargo he carried and was always the gentleman with Darcy. Sure, he was up for anything she’d ask of him, but the moment he felt her tensing in fear he’d slow and steady his pace, rolling like the ocean. Steve was all that amiable comfort, somewhat awkward enthusiasm and effortless mass. 

Grinding into Steve and feeling the eager thrust of his hips rising to meet hers brought it all back.

“Where were you just now?” Steve asked, looking down at Darcy. He looked at people like they were the only thing in his world at that moment, the only thing he cared about or cared to think about.

“Sorry. Just thinking of an old friend you remind me of.”

Steve quirked an eyebrow, inquisitive without being demanding. Steve’s lack of a recent past made Darcy feel a little guilty about depriving him of the opportunity to share vicariously in hers, but she also did _not_ want him to know she was thinking of a willing gelding named Tonto while rubbing her ladyparts on his manly bits. Instead, she pulled him in for a kiss.  
\--  
“Clint.” Darcy poked Clint in the shoulder. “Clint. Clint. Clint Clint Clint Clint. CLINT.” He had started out the verbal barrage honestly distracted, sorting through arrowheads; his subtle, mischievous smile was the only indication that he’d heard Darcy.

“Hm?” he made an enquiring sound.

“It’s your turn for date night planning - what do you want to do?”

“Why do you need to know?” he returned, looking innocently up at her. Steve rolled his eyes at them—their flirting bordered on annoying sometimes, much like each of them individually.

“Because I need to know if I need to do laundry. J is awesome at it, but he needs two hours’ lead time to be sure my unmentionables are toasty, warm and dry.”

“I’d mention your unmentionables,” Clint growled, rolling towards Darcy to bite at her neck playfully.

“That doesn’t make sense.” Darcy rolled just far enough out of biting range that he ended up flopped over her, pinning her torso and pillowing his head on her cleavage.

“I thought we could go out. I hadn’t really thought about it, though.”

“Ooh! We should go dancing. I haven’t been to a decent club in... Are you okay, Steve?”

Steve felt like he was going insane, in moments like those. This huge well of emotion he hadn’t even been aware of would rise up and swamp him. He knew his eyes were shiny with tears, and he’d probably gone that waxy white color he’d come to associate with psychologist sessions. He stood and attempted escape.

Natasha was there; always Natasha, or Clint, or Darcy. She blocked the doorway and laid a hand on his arm. Too quietly for the others to hear, she looked him in the eyes and spoke. “Perhaps they would play us something slow. You wouldn’t want to step on our feet.”

She wasn’t Peggy, but with her soft curls, her dark lips and _strength_ she was so close. Steve broke, actually crying. Natasha pulled his head to her shoulder and rubbed his back while he cried. Two more bodies pressed into him from the sides—Clint’s strong arm wrapped around his waist and Darcy pressed all down the side of him, kissing him sweetly on the temple.

“We don’t have to go dancing if you don’t want to. It was just a suggestion.” Darcy was a brave woman in her own off-kilter way, but seeing people she cared about break down obviously scared her. Her voice was tremulous and timid.

Natasha shook under his head with a chuckle.

“No, Darce. I would love to go dancing. I just don’t know how,” he managed through tears. Darcy nudged him with a box of tissues.

“We can teach you. I’ve seen you in action Soldier Boy—I’m sure you can manage a two-step.”

Clint and Darcy put him back on the couch, and abruptly he found himself telling them the whole story—his last seconds awake while he aimed Schmidt’s plane into the ice and his last words with Peggy. By the time he was done nobody was up for going out, let alone dancing. Darcy was watery with sympathetic tears. Clint looked like he was remembering his own moment of loss. Natasha sat beside him, a sturdy bulwark propping him up.

“How did you-”

“Peggy Carter had some personal documents sent to SHIELD after your recovery. The radio transcripts were in there.” Natasha ran her fingers down his arm in a soothing pattern. “She had quite a memory, Colonel Carter.”

“Yes she did.” Steve smiled down at Natasha. “Would you really want to go dancing?”

Natasha looked up at him with a smile that barely brushed her lips, but danced in her eyes. “It can’t be worse than Clint’s 80’s karaoke night.”

**Author's Note:**

> The Porny Winter Soldier Saga is being written right now in this series. A bunch of scenes of how everyone not-Steve views their weird relationship came together and begged to be written. As always, comments, questions, or concerns are appreciated! Special thanks to Trisha for providing a really wonderful beta'ing.


End file.
